A Connections helper that doesn't hand you the groups. Paste the sixteen words from today's board and it surfaces the structural patterns the purple and blue tiers are made from — shared beginnings and endings, words hiding inside other words, anagram pairs, add-a-letter pairs, double letters — and leaves the deciding to you.
It exists because the hardest part of Connections is not knowing the words; it is noticing the *shape* the puzzle is using. A human scanning sixteen words for hidden smaller words misses half of them. The helper doesn't.
Use it when you're down to eight or four words and the meanings don't cohere. If nothing lights up, the remaining group is about meaning rather than letters — celebrities, brands, things that precede a word — and the Connections hint today page will get you there.
Try the connections helper
Paste today's sixteen words, separated by spaces or commas. The helper points at structural patterns — the kind purple and blue groups are made of — and leaves the deciding to you.
What the helper checks
Each check maps to a purple-group mechanism seen repeatedly in the game's history.
- Shared endings and beginnings — two- and three-letter runs common to three or more words ("___ ball", "…ING").
- Hidden words — a word that appears inside another board word.
- Anagram pairs — words that rearrange into each other.
- Add-a-letter pairs — a word that becomes another board word with one letter added at either end.
- Same first letter — four or more words starting alike, which often signals an initials-based category.
- Double letters and vowel-less words — structural oddities the Times uses as a category on their own.
What it deliberately doesn't do
It never groups words for you and never guesses categories. That is a choice: the point of Connections is the deduction, and a tool that solves the board makes the game pointless. If you want the answer, the answer page has it. This tool is for the moment before that — when you want a second pair of eyes on the letters.